In jOOQ 3.1, the notion of a SQLDialect.family() was introduced, in order to group several similar SQL dialects into a common family. An example for this is SQL Server, which is supported by jOOQ in various versions:

SQL Server: The "version-less" SQL Server version. This always maps to the latest supported version of SQL Server

In the above list, SQLSERVER is both a dialect and a family of three dialects. This distinction is used internally by jOOQ to distinguish whether to use the OFFSET .. FETCH clause (SQL Server 2012), or whether to emulate it using ROW_NUMBER() OVER() (SQL Server 2008).